1. Hempenstall, K. (1999). The role of phonics in learning to read: What does recent research say? Fine Print, 22(1),
7-12.
The role of phonics in learning to read: What does recent research say?
by Dr Kerry Hempenstall
The role of phonics instruction in learning to read has always been controversial. It has been particularly so in the
last 15 years in Australia given the dominance of the Whole Language movement in pre-service and in-service
teacher education, and in education department policies. The Whole Language philosophy rejects explicit phonics
teaching on principle because it teaches reading by emphasising units smaller than the whole word, that is, through
individual letters, syllables and morphemes.
In several English speaking countries, there is a strong momentum for reform of reading instruction. Dramatic
legislation in the USA and Britain in recent months may possibly lead to similarly far-reaching policy changes in
Australia in the not-too-distant future. The changes have arisen because of an overwhelming concern over literacy
in those communities, and because of evidence that the Whole Language model of reading, the same approach
supported by governments throughout Australia, is exacerbating the problem.
International directions
In the USA, the Reading Excellence Act (1999) was recently enacted because of the unacceptably low reading
achievement of students in US schools. It acknowledges that part of the responsibility rests with methods of
reading instruction, and with policies that have been insensitive to developments in the understanding of the
reading process. The Act attempts to bridge the gulf between research and classroom practice by mandating that
only programs in reading that have been shown to be effective according to strict research criteria will be funded
in future. This reverses a trend in which the criterion for adoption of a model was that it met preconceived notions
of ‘rightness’ rather than that it was demonstrably effective for students. Thus, the basis for adoption of programs
formerly emphasised preferred process over student outcome.
Under the new Federal system, explicit phonics teaching is highlighted as an essential element in any beginning
reading program. Teacher training institutes have long emphasised Whole Language as the model of choice, and
few teachers have been provided with the skills necessary to teach in the newly prescibed manner, so massive
teacher retraining programs are being introduced. Of the programs thus far accredited for funding, two
approaches are known in Australia: Direct Instruction (Corrective Reading, Reading Mastery, Teach Your Child
to Read in 100 Easy Lessons), and Success For All. Both approaches emphasise early and systematic instruction in
phonemic awareness and make use of explicit phonics in the early stages of reading. Though unsupported by
Department of Education funding, the Direct Instruction approach is now in use in an estimated 150-200 schools
in Victoria. Its value in assisting those students who struggle with reading is being increasingly recognised by
schools, most of which adopt the programs after viewing their use in other local schools.
In Britain, the National Literacy Strategy (1998) has been released to all primary schools, requiring them to
abandon the current Whole Language approach to reading. Components of the former system such as reliance on
context clues to aid word reading are discredited in the Strategy, and explicit phonics are to be introduced from
the earliest stages of reading.
Current practice in Australia
In Australia, some Whole Language purists consider phonic cues have no place at all in a reading program, though
most would view them as worthy of mention as secondary strategies. They envisage reading as primarily a
linguistic rather than a visual exercise; one of only sampling segments of the print and actively predicting what the
words will be. If children need assistance, they are urged to predict more wisely by attending more closely to the

2. context. This approach is disastrous for learners in difficulty, and has been gradually discredited by research over
the last fifteen years.
Even those who acknowledge a role for phonic cues in Whole Language approaches expect students only to
identify a letter or two of a word so as to aid the confirmation of the guess. Further, Whole Language advocates
argue that these phonic cues can and should be learned without explicit teaching. A central belief is that exposure
to meaningful, authentic literature is all that is required to learn to read because learning to read entails similar
processes as learning to speak - a natural process. Since we learn to speak without formal instruction, so we
should learn to read the same way. Unfortunately, it isn't so. Mastering a written language is an achievement that
far outweighs the requirements of speech production. Written language is an artificial, visually-based device quite
distinctly more challenging than the biologically-wired, sounds-based processes of speech.
Phonemic awareness: The missing link?
An extensive amount of reading research over the past ten years has emphasised the critical role of phonemic
awareness in successfully beginning reading. It is an awareness that words are made up of smaller sound segments
or phonemes. It is this conscious reflection on the structure of words that allows us to decide that "sat" has three
phonemes, and "splat" has five. This is a difficult task for young children - many even consider a spoken sentence
as one continuous stream of sound. With appropriate help, they can learn to distinguish individual words despite
the uninterrupted flow of a sentence. In stages, they learn to appreciate that it is possible to segment words into
syllables (foot-ball); and, around Year 1, into phonemes (m-a-t). This awareness is critical in learning to read and
spell an alphabetic writing system like ours. It is a skill that can be reliably and accurately assessed in children, it
can be taught or (for the fortunate) it may be deduced by experience with print. Its absence is now considered a
major cause of reading failure, though its presence alone does not guarantee success.
The relationship between phonics and phonemic awareness is often misunderstood. Phonemic awareness is an
aural/oral skill that (at least in part) can exist without contact with print. Until contact with writing however, there
is no communicative value in developing such a skill, and many children do not routinely pay attention to these
meaningless segments of speech, and hence do not develop this capacity. Other children become fascinated with
rhymes and alliteration, Pig Latin, Spoonerisms, and they enjoy inventing words - constructing them from speech
segments. Some children enter school with thousands of hours of valuable literacy experience through rhyming
games, Sesame Street, Playschool, I-Spy, plastic letter games, stories read to them, and teaching dolly to read.
Other children have had either little interest or lacked the opportunity for such exploration. Still others may have
had such experiences but without taking the cognitive leap towards a conscious awareness. Students described as
dyslexics, for example, may have a weakness (perhaps partly genetic) in this area, and require intensive structured
teaching (as opposed to mere opportunities) to develop their phonemic awareness. A lack of phonemic awareness
alone is not a primary language deficit, as it is unnecessary for oral communication, and only becomes important
when one is confronted with the reading task.
When print is encountered, the capacity to perform the phonemic operations described above becomes critically
important. In order to develop the alphabetic principle (that units of print map onto units of sound), students must
already have (or soon develop) phonemic awareness. It is the alphabetic principle that allows students to move
beyond the early logographic stage of reading in which each word is a unique, indivisible shape to be recognised
visually. Memory constraints make the logographic strategy of limited usefulness and the strategy does not assist
students to decipher words previously unseen. When students enter a reading program with phonemic awareness
they are part the way towards appreciating the alphabetic principle. Reading becomes a task that ‘makes sense’,
not a confusing array of shapes jumbled together seemingly at random. When phonemic awareness and letter-
sound knowledge are combined the effects are enhanced; that is, the children associate the shape of a letter with
the sound in a word.
It is the understanding of the alphabetic principle that allows students to decipher novel words. Using the
alphabetic principle as a cipher represents what Perfetti (1991) calls a productive process in contrast to the very

3. limited process of memorising words. Share (1995) sees this phonological recoding process as critical to the
development of skilled reading, and describes it as being “... a self-teaching mechanism, enabling the learner to
acquire the detailed orthographic representations necessary for rapid, autonomous, visual word recognition” (p.
152). This point is also critically important in designing effective programs for older students. Tempting as it may
be to teach whole word recognition to older struggling readers because the phonic strategies seem so ‘babyish’,
one cannot bypass the ‘sounding-out’ stage. It is a necessary step on the path to automatic whole word
recognition. It is only by practising these steps that ‘word pictures’ arise.
Many students enter school with little phonemic awareness (Adams, 1990), and exposure to any one of a variety
of forms of reading tuition may be sufficient to stimulate such awareness for them, thus making the alphabetic
principle more readily conceptualised. However, in an unacceptably high number of students this process does not
occur. The aim of phonics teaching is to make explicit to students this alphabetic principle. In a Whole Language
classroom, in which phonics is viewed at best as one (subsidiary) strategy among others, to be used only when the
prediction-confirmation strategy breaks down, there is considerably less emphasis on student mastery of this
principle.
Teachers may point out word parts to students in the context of authentic literature as the situation arises, but the
limitations of such incidental phonics may impact most heavily on at-risk students (Simner:1995). The major
problem for at-risk students, argued by Byrne (1996) involves the risk for such learners of failing to be explicit and
unambiguous. It might be prudent to tell children directly about the alphabetic principle since it appears unwise to
rely on their discovery of it themselves. The apparent relative success of programs that do that (Bradley &
Bryant:1983; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley:1991, 1993, 1995) support the wisdom of direct instruction. (p. 424)
Similar sentiments have been expressed by a number of researchers in recent years (Adams & Bruck:1993; Baker,
Kameenui, Simmons, & Stahl:1994; Bateman:1991; Blachman:1991; Felton & Pepper:1995; Foorman:1995;
Foorman, Francis, Beeler, Winikates, & Fletcher:1997; Moats:1994; Simmons, Gunn, Smith, & Kameenui:1995;
Singh, Deitz, & Singh:1992; Spector:1995; Tunmer & Hoover:1993; Weir:1990).
Consensus remains to be achieved regarding the details of the strategies best able to ensure the understanding of
the alphabetic principle; however, the cited authors acknowledge that direct instructional approaches are more
likely to be successful than relying upon discovery or embedded-phonics approaches.
Phonics ain't phonics
If one accepts the value in teaching phonics, there are essentially two approaches that may be employed: implicit
and explicit phonics instruction. What is the difference? In an explicit (synthetic) program, students will learn 40-
50 associations between letters and their sounds. This may entail showing students the graphemes and teaching
them the sounds that correspond to them, as in “This letter you are looking at makes the sound sssss”.
Alternatively, some teachers prefer teaching students single sounds first, and then later introducing the visual cue
(the grapheme) for the sound, as in “You know the mmmm sound we've been practising, well here's the letter used
in writing that tells us to make that sound”.
In an explicit program, the processes of blending (“What word do these sounds make when we put them together
mmm-aaa-nnn?”), and segmenting (“Sound out this word for me”) are also taught. It is of little value knowing
what are the building blocks of our language's structure if one does not know how to put those blocks together
appropriately to allow written communication, or to separate them to enable decoding of a letter grouping. After
letter-sound correspondence has been taught, phonograms (such as: er, ir, ur, wor, ear, sh, ee, th) are introduced,
and more complex words can be introduced into reading activities. In conjunction with this approach ‘controlled
vocabulary’ stories are employed - books using only words decodable using the students' current knowledge base.
Herein lies another problem for Whole Language purists. A fascination with authentic texts precludes the use of
controlled vocabulary stories - the very ones that will build students' confidence in the decoding strategies that
they have been taught. Flooding children with an uncontrolled array of words does no favours for struggling

4. students; it forces them to guess from context (a strategy promoted by their Whole Language teachers). Even
good readers find that contextual guessing is accurate on only about one occasion in four. Guessing is a hallmark
of poor readers - good readers abandon it as moribund. The end result is that struggling students are burdened
with a limp strategy - one that fails them regularly when they most need it.
The term “synthetic” is often used synonymously with “explicit” because it implies the synthesis (or building up)
of phonic skills from their smallest unit (graphemes). Similarly, “analytic” is used synonymously with “implicit”
because it signifies the analysis (breaking down) of the whole word to its parts (an analysis only necessary when a
child cannot read it as a whole word). In implicit phonics, students are expected to absorb or induce the required
information from the word's structure merely from presentation of similar sounding words (“The sound you want
occurs in these words: mad, maple, moon”). The words may be pointed to or spoken by the teacher, but the
sounds in isolation from words are never presented to children. A major problem with implicit phonics methods is
the erroneous assumption that all students will already have the fairly sophisticated phonemic awareness skills
needed to enable the comparison of sounds within the various words. More importantly, when the effects on
readers of implicit phonics programs are compared with those of explicit programs, the differences are significant
and favour explicit approaches (Foorman, et al.:1997).
The instructional process
There are also two approaches to the instructional process (as opposed to the instructional content) - “systematic”
and “incidental”. In systematic instruction, attention is directed to the detail of the teaching process. Instruction
will usually be teacher-directed, based on an analysis of the skills required and their sequence. At its most
systematic, it will probably involve careful demonstration, massed and spaced practice of those skills (sometimes
in isolation), corrective feedback of errors, and continuous evaluation of progress.
Incidental (or discovery, or embedded) instruction shifts the responsibility for making use of phonic cues from the
teacher to the student. It assumes that students will develop a self-sustaining, natural, unique reading style that
integrates the use of contextual and graphophonic cues, avoiding the (argued) negative effects of systematic
instruction.
In Whole Language literature is now something of an about-face. The new position is “But we've never
disparaged phonics, only the teaching of it outside of the context of stories”. Unfortunately, even if one accepted
this sophism, such a restriction precludes many students from deriving benefit from phonics.
Purist Whole Language teachers have never felt comfortable with demonstrating to students precisely how words
are composed of sounds. They were exhorted in their training not to examine words at other than the level of their
meaning. Teachers who acceded to this stricture took meaning-centredness to extremes, unfortunately producing
an example of ideology precluding effectiveness. Other Whole Language teachers who could not accept such an
extreme view, might have included some references to alliteration or rhyming words during a story. “Did you
notice that ‘cat’ and ‘mat’ end with the same sound?” Sadly, for struggling students such well-intentioned clues
are neither explicit enough, nor are they likely to occur with sufficient frequency to have any beneficial impact.
This approach is sometimes called “embedded phonics” because teachers are restricted to using only the
opportunities for intra-word teaching provided within any given story.
Many students have great difficulty in appreciating individual sound-spelling relationships if their only
opportunities to master them occur at variable intervals, and solely within a story context. In a story, the primary
focus is quite properly on story comprehension not word structure; in this circumstance focussing on word parts is
both distracting and ineffective.
Activities in context or in isolation?

5. The ‘We do phonics in context’ model also implies that it is valuable to mix phonics instruction with
comprehension activities. In the early years of schooling, students are vastly superior in oral comprehension
compared to written comprehension. Most children enter school already knowing thousands of words, but it is
some years before their written vocabulary matches their oral lexicon. Written and oral language development are
each appropriate emphases for instruction, but given the wide initial disparity, it is more effective to address them
separately. Thus, the use of teacher-read stories is an appropriate vehicle for oral comprehension, and allows for a
level of language complexity that students could not attain if the stories were presented in written form. The
relatively undeveloped decoding skill requires simpler text to allow the development of the competence and
confidence needed for the ultimate objective - equivalent oral/written comprehension proficiency. Those arguing
that the two are inextricable have confused process with objective, and compromise the development of both oral
and written language.
What phonics elements should be included in a comprehensive reading program?
There are aspects of reading that are not well comprehended unless they are explicitly taught in isolation from
meaningful text. Among these are letter-sound correspondences. Children must be taught the most common
sounds that letters represent, and at-risk students especially require careful systematic instruction in individual
letter-sound correspondences (“This letter says mmm”). At-risk students also need ample practice of these sounds
in isolation from stories if they are to build a memory of each sound-symbol relationship. Second, they must have
the opportunity to practise these phonic generalizations in text that is controlled for regularity to a reasonable
degree, otherwise they may fail to appreciate the benefits of this strategy. Phonics encourages children to seek
patterns of letters they can recognise. It also focuses attention on all the letters, not only a few; we know from eye
movement studies that skilled readers view every letter and do not sample only a few as some Whole Language
theorists have claimed.
Students also must be able to blend the letters or letter clusters. The beginning reader approximates the word by
sounding it out, and then matching that approximation to a real word that fits the meaning of the sentence. This
requires teaching and time allotted for adequate practice - children vary in the amount of practice needed to
achieve mastery. Blends should be taught as continuous sounds where possible e.g. “man” should be sounded
“mmmaaannn” not as “mmm-aaa-nnn”. Continuous blends make it easier to telescope the sounds into a real word.
Oral reading practice provides the teacher with opportunities to provide corrective feedback to students. Every
error (not only those altering meaning) is an opportunity for teaching: systematic correction is far more valuable
for students than is waiting for self-correction, or worse, ignoring errors because of the erroneous view that
correction may dishearten the child, or because of a faith that errors will eventually reduce through some
presumed but undefined mechanism.
Automatic, rapid, context-free decoding occurs as the over-learned sequences of letters gradually begin to be
perceived as syllables and words. Then skilled reading becomes so effortless that our limited attentional capacity
can be devoted to comprehension of what we read. In contrast, children who continue to struggle at the level of
print are using most of their attention to decode, and have little left to devote to comprehension. About 90% of
reading problems occur at the level of the word (Stuart:1995), not with the process of comprehension. Once
children master the basics, subsequent progress is largely determined by their volume of reading experience.
Hence, our reading program should now be devoted to ensuring literature matches their interest and extends their
higher order comprehension processes. To see children progressing in this way is exhilarating. To presume that
the processes of skilled reading can be induced in children without their progressing through beginning stages is
sadly misguided.
Does phonics mean enormous quantities of work sheet exercises, trying to remember large numbers of rules with
dubious utility? Does it necessitate the use of such stilted stories as “Nan can fan Dan”? It certainly happened in
past times when the purpose of reading became submerged under a fascination with the elements of the process.

6. However, research has continued to separate the necessary from the marginal, and has increasingly defined the
proper place of phonics in a comprehensive literacy program.
Phonics is the starting motor for an engine subsequently fuelled by confidence and enjoyment. Some starting
motors turn sluggishly and demand a significant load from the battery (parents and teacher). If the battery fails, the
journey may never begin. However, all phonics are not equal. It is possible to teach phonics carefully and with
parsimony; it is possible to do so ineffectively and excessively; and it is possible to do it in name only. Questions
such as “What/When/How much phonics?” continue to be examined, but not the question “Should we teach
phonics?”, for it has been answered resoundingly in the affirmative.
Dr. Kerry Hempenstall is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology and Intellectual Disability Studies at Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Bundoora
References
Adams, M.J., 1990, Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baker, S. K., Kameenui, E. J., Simmons, D. C., & Stahl, S. A., 1994,. “Beginning reading: Educational tools for
diverse learners” School Psychology Review, 23, 372-391.
Bateman, B., 1991,. “Teaching word recognition to slow-learning children”, Reading, Writing and Learning
Disabilities, 7, 1-16.
Blachman, B. A., 1991,. “Early intervention for children's reading problems: Clinical applications of the research
in phonological awareness”, Topics in Language Disorders, 12 (1), 51-65.
Byrne, B., 1996,. “The learnability of the alphabetic principle: Children's initial hypotheses about how print
represents spoken speech”, Applied Psycholinguistics, 17, 401-426.
Felton, R. H. & Pepper, P. P.. 1995,. “Early identification and intervention of phonological deficit in kindergarten
and early elementary children at risk for reading disability”, School Psychology Review, 24,
405-414.
Foorman, B. R., 1995,. “Research on ‘The Great Debate’: Code-oriented versus Whole Language approaches to
reading instruction”, School Psychology Review, 24, 376-392.
Foorman, B. R., Francis, D. J., Beeler, T., Winikates, D., & Fletcher, J., 1997, “Early interventions for children
with reading problems: Study designs and preliminary findings” Learning Disabilities: A Multidisciplinary
Journal, 8, 63-71.
Moats, L. C., 1994, “The missing foundation in teacher education: Knowledge of the structure of spoken and
written language” Annals of Dyslexia, 44, 81-102.
Perfetti, C. A., 1991, “Representations and awareness in the acquisition of reading competence”. In L. Rieben, &
C. A. Perfetti (Eds.), Learning to read: Basic research and its implications, pp. 33-44,. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Share, D. L., 1995, “Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition” Cognition, 55,
151-218.
Simmons, D. C., Gunn, B., Smith, S. B., & Kameenui, E. J., 1995, “Phonological awareness: Application of
instructional design”, LD Forum, 19(2), 7-10.
Simner, M. L., 1995, “Reply to the Ministries' reactions to the Canadian Psychological Association's position
paper on beginning reading instruction”, Canadian Psychology, 36, 333-342.
Singh, N. N., Deitz, D. E. D. & Singh, J., 1992, “Behavioural approaches’, In Nirbay N. Singh, & Ivan L. Beale
(Eds.) Learning disabilities: Nature, theory, and treatment. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Spector, J., 1995, “Phonemic awareness training: Application of principles of direct instruction”, Reading and
Writing Quarterly, 11, 37-51.
Stuart,M., 1995, “Prediction and qualitative assessment of five and six-year-old children's reading: A longitudinal
study”, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 65, 287-296.
Tunmer, W. E. & Hoover, W. A., 1993, “Phonological recoding skill and beginning reading”, Reading & Writing:
An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5, 161-179.
Weir, R., 1990, “Philosophy, cultural beliefs and literacy” Interchange, 21 (4), 24-33.

7. However, research has continued to separate the necessary from the marginal, and has increasingly defined the
proper place of phonics in a comprehensive literacy program.
Phonics is the starting motor for an engine subsequently fuelled by confidence and enjoyment. Some starting
motors turn sluggishly and demand a significant load from the battery (parents and teacher). If the battery fails, the
journey may never begin. However, all phonics are not equal. It is possible to teach phonics carefully and with
parsimony; it is possible to do so ineffectively and excessively; and it is possible to do it in name only. Questions
such as “What/When/How much phonics?” continue to be examined, but not the question “Should we teach
phonics?”, for it has been answered resoundingly in the affirmative.
Dr. Kerry Hempenstall is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology and Intellectual Disability Studies at Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Bundoora
References
Adams, M.J., 1990, Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baker, S. K., Kameenui, E. J., Simmons, D. C., & Stahl, S. A., 1994,. “Beginning reading: Educational tools for
diverse learners” School Psychology Review, 23, 372-391.
Bateman, B., 1991,. “Teaching word recognition to slow-learning children”, Reading, Writing and Learning
Disabilities, 7, 1-16.
Blachman, B. A., 1991,. “Early intervention for children's reading problems: Clinical applications of the research
in phonological awareness”, Topics in Language Disorders, 12 (1), 51-65.
Byrne, B., 1996,. “The learnability of the alphabetic principle: Children's initial hypotheses about how print
represents spoken speech”, Applied Psycholinguistics, 17, 401-426.
Felton, R. H. & Pepper, P. P.. 1995,. “Early identification and intervention of phonological deficit in kindergarten
and early elementary children at risk for reading disability”, School Psychology Review, 24,
405-414.
Foorman, B. R., 1995,. “Research on ‘The Great Debate’: Code-oriented versus Whole Language approaches to
reading instruction”, School Psychology Review, 24, 376-392.
Foorman, B. R., Francis, D. J., Beeler, T., Winikates, D., & Fletcher, J., 1997, “Early interventions for children
with reading problems: Study designs and preliminary findings” Learning Disabilities: A Multidisciplinary
Journal, 8, 63-71.
Moats, L. C., 1994, “The missing foundation in teacher education: Knowledge of the structure of spoken and
written language” Annals of Dyslexia, 44, 81-102.
Perfetti, C. A., 1991, “Representations and awareness in the acquisition of reading competence”. In L. Rieben, &
C. A. Perfetti (Eds.), Learning to read: Basic research and its implications, pp. 33-44,. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Share, D. L., 1995, “Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition” Cognition, 55,
151-218.
Simmons, D. C., Gunn, B., Smith, S. B., & Kameenui, E. J., 1995, “Phonological awareness: Application of
instructional design”, LD Forum, 19(2), 7-10.
Simner, M. L., 1995, “Reply to the Ministries' reactions to the Canadian Psychological Association's position
paper on beginning reading instruction”, Canadian Psychology, 36, 333-342.
Singh, N. N., Deitz, D. E. D. & Singh, J., 1992, “Behavioural approaches’, In Nirbay N. Singh, & Ivan L. Beale
(Eds.) Learning disabilities: Nature, theory, and treatment. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Spector, J., 1995, “Phonemic awareness training: Application of principles of direct instruction”, Reading and
Writing Quarterly, 11, 37-51.
Stuart,M., 1995, “Prediction and qualitative assessment of five and six-year-old children's reading: A longitudinal
study”, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 65, 287-296.
Tunmer, W. E. & Hoover, W. A., 1993, “Phonological recoding skill and beginning reading”, Reading & Writing:
An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5, 161-179.
Weir, R., 1990, “Philosophy, cultural beliefs and literacy” Interchange, 21 (4), 24-33.